A baked potato with butter
4 June 2021
Potato has a mostly straightforward etymology with one element that is not adequately explained. The English word is a borrowing from the Spanish patata, which in turn is from the Taino batata. Diccionario de la Lengua Española says that the Spanish word is a blend of the Taino word and papa, the Quechua word for the tuber, which can explain the shift from /b/ to /p/. Although both /b/ and /p/ are frequently swapped (they’re both bilabial plosives, and it’s easy to say one when one intends to say the other), so there really isn’t a need to introduce a second word to explain the shift.
The real mystery is the change in the final vowel from the /a/ in Spanish to a diphthong in English, either /əʊ/ (British) or /oʊ/ (North American), and the resulting spelling shift from <a> to <o>. Such a shift to a diphthong rarely happens in a terminal vowel. My best guess is that since the <o> spelling is present in the earliest English examples of the word it is a result of the initial English interlocuters mishearing the Spanish vowel. The English sailors, who were the first to encounter the Spanish/Taino word, were not, as a rule, careful recorders of language. And, given that English spelling in the period was not standardized, it shouldn’t be a surprise that they wrote an <o> and that spelling caught on. A similar diphthongization occurs with tobacco, although there the Spanish spelling is with a terminal <o> too.
The earliest recorded use of potato in English is a reference to the sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas. It is from 1565, found in John Sparke’s account of John Hawkins’s 1564–65 expedition to the Americas. The Oxford English Dictionary credits Hawkins as the author, but Sparke, who accompanied Hawkins on the voyage, is actually the author of the account:
Also they brought downe to vs which we bought for beades, pewter whistles, glasses, kniues, and other trifles, Hennes, Potatoes and pines. These potatoes be the most delicate rootes that may be eaten, and doe far exceede their passeneps or carets.
The use of the word to refer to the common potato, Solanum tuberosum, comes a few decades later. It appears in a 1597 botany text by John Gerard:
Virginia Potatoes hath many hollowe flexible branches, trailing vppon the grounde, three square, vneuen, knotted or kneed in sundry places at certaine distances [...] The roote is thicke, fat, and tuberous; not much differeing either in shape, colour or taste from the common Potatoes, sauing that the rootes hereof are not so great nor long; some of them round as a ball, some ouall or egge fashion, some longer, and others shorter: which knobbie rootes are fastened vnto the stalkes with an infinite number of threddie strings.
Although Gerard calls them “Virginia potatoes,” they, like the sweet potato, are native to the tropical Americas, although by the time European explorers encountered them, indigenous people of North America were also cultivating them—trade routes existed in pre-Columbian America and the potato had moved northward along them. The name Virginia potato may reflect where the English first encountered the tuber.
Cf. spud
Sources:
Diccionario de la Lengua Española. Real Academia Española, 2020, s.v. patata.
Gerard, John. “Of Potatoes of Virginia.” The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. London: John Norton, 1597, 781. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2021, s.v. potato, n.
Sparke, John. “The Voyage Made by the Worshipful M. Iohn Hawkins” (1565). The Hawkins’ Voyages. Clements R. Markham, ed. Hakluyt Society, 1878. New York: Burt Franklin, 27. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Renee Comet, 1994, U.S. National Institutes of Health. Public domain image.